"What They Do to Us, They Will Do to You"

beatriz

Weekend Edition
July 15 / 17, 2005

"What They Do to Us, They Will Do to You"
Shell Oil in Mayo, Ireland
By HARRY BROWNE

Dublin, Ireland.

While media attention here focuses across the Irish Sea and beyond on arrests and searches in relation to the London bombs, five men from Mayo in the west of Ireland have spent most of the last month in a Dublin jail.
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While the President of Ireland's High Court heaps some of his own verbal contempt on them, and respectable opinion tsk-tsks about their tactics, the men have caught the imaginations of much of the public, and an increasingly spirited campaign has grown in support of them ­ with hundreds of people picketing Shell stations and a "solidarity camp" set up in Mayo on the pipeline route. (....)

The negative publicity has begun to get to Shell, which has started to back down in the latest court appearances, and the Irish Government has been keen to find a compromise. But the men and their supporters are in no mood for compromise, because the story of Shell in Mayo is a disgraceful history of suspected corruption and indifference to local safety concerns. (....)
The story has obvious international dimensions. The rape of Ogoni lands in Nigeria by the self-same petro-giant has already been highlighted by campaigners (it's just 10 years since the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others in Nigeria), and eyebrows have at last begun to be raised about the sweetheart deal that brought the company to the Mayo coast.

"I lecture to my students about the way Exxon Mobil rips off Equatorial Guinea, with the country getting only 12 per cent of the revenue from its own oil," a development-studies academic in Dublin told Counterpunch. "But here's Shell in Ireland getting a deal to extract Irish gas and the Irish State and people get absolutely nothing." Campaigners wonder if some relevant funds might be sitting in a politician's offshore account.
(....)
The message is getting across to the public, as the Rossport Five draw on a long Irish tradition of jailed resisters to imperial power. Ó Seighin tapped straight into that tradition and threw in some class consciousness when he cited the support they're getting from their "ordinary" fellow prisoners in Cloverhill Jail: "They have a tremendous, very accurate sense of right and wrong that is slightly missing in more exalted society."

Excellent ongoing coverage and background is available at www.indymedia.ie.

Harry Browne lectures in the school of media at Dublin Institute of Technology and writes for Village magazine. Contact him at harrybrowne@eircom.net

continue reading: Counterpunch - http://www.counterpunch.com/browne07162005.html